Category: General

A principle sometimes used to contrast economics and politics is that exit is more powerful than voice. That is, the capacity to take your business elsewhere has a stronger influence on most companies than asking them to change things. This is contrasted with politics because your exit options are smaller in political situations: you might leave your town, but things need to get pretty dire before you leave your country. (It is a related truism that you can quickly judge the freedom and prosperity of a society by which way the border guards face. No one was trying to sneak into East Germany.)

Gamers treasure voice. I mean, here we are on an online gaming blog, so we talk at length about what we like and would prefer. The advantage of voice is that you can send a more precise message. “I think it was a bad idea to add the Living World PvE content to the WvW zones. Please remove it.” Exit is a blunt weapon: you leave, and the company can draw its own conclusions. Of course, the discerning company is going to draw its own conclusions anyway, because what people say and what they do often differ (another major economic principle).
Continue reading Exit and Voice

If you have not yet bought the new Humble Bundle, you can go do so now. Has there been a better one? I considered half the games worth buying at full retail price, and now you can get all six for however much you want to pay.

• Arkham Asylum GOTY
• Arkham City GOTY
• FEAR 2
• FEAR 3
• LotR: War in the North
• Scribblenauts Unlimited

: Zubon

I used to play Magic the Gathering Online (MTGO) back in the day. The reason I don’t play anymore is because they took away my beloved leagues, and now are hiding behind developer incompetency to make it look like the absence of leagues is not a business decision (yeah, I might be cynical after a few years of waiting). I don’t have time to sit around to play a sealed format in MTGO, and playing high-level constructed format is just not worth my money. I get better multiplayer jollies in real life so I don’t play MTGO.

Oh yeah, leagues. So leagues in the Magic the Gathering world is a game format where players get a pool of cards (e.g., 6 boosters) and then they create a 40-card deck. Unlike a more standard sealed deck tournament, the sealed league deck survives week to week. On top of that each week players are allowed to add one booster of cards to add new card blood to the pool. Leagues are fair (closed/sealed format) and give time to think and fiddle with the deck. Players are rated based on matches in the league, and usually there are rules for extra games to be played. Once the league is over the deck is retired.

At Richard and Astalnar’s suggestions, I tried Arena in Hearthstone. I will admit it was much better in terms of what I might be looking for in an online CCG, and more importantly it scratched that league’s itch. Continue reading Hearthstone – The Deck’s League

I just got in to the Heartstone beta. Hearthstone is the computer-aided, online TCG or CCG, whichever suits you best, created by a small-squad Blizzard team. I was interested mainly because the UI grabbed me, and I like playing Duels of the Planeswalkers, which is the Magic the Gathering video game series. I am a long time CCG fan, and I frequently play Magic the Gathering with my gaming group.

A Lighter Faire

This is a light-hearted CCG. I remember picking up Pokemon a long time ago back when I did not fully understand the intricacies of Magic (like the stack, which is f’in critical to understand).  Pokemon is still pretty complex compared to Hearthstone, and that is part of Hearthstone’s charm. Continue reading Hearthstone Beta Thoughts

One thing Disney does really well is queuing. The theme parks manage lines well and almost all have a “pre-ride experience,” something to do/see while waiting. For example, if you are waiting for The Little Mermaid ride, the line winds through a structure that looks like a rocky cove, children are encouraged to point out items for digital crabs to take to Scuttle, and later Scuttle is holding court with an extended routine about the items crabs are bringing him. The Haunted Mansion has a graveyard with humorous epitaphs, an area to take pictures with some sculptures, interactive musical and water-shooting mausoleums, cast members in-character as household staff of the doomed, and then several tiers of queues as there is an outside line, a room where riders are collected, a next room where the walls grow (copied from Disneyland, where an elevator was needed for space reasons, I am told), and then a final queue before the actual ride. You are still waiting, but it feels like there is something to do, and when the lines are very short it sometimes feels like you are missing something if you skip that content.

Disney is also starting to use a Fastpass system whereby you can schedule a time to come back and skip towards the front of the line. You are queuing virtually and can do other things, which moderates the lines at the most popular attractions.

Across town, Universal has some pre-ride experiences, but is instead trying to monetize their lines. They have an express pass system, whereby you can pay more to skip to the front of lines at popular attractions. The marketing for this is delicate, as they are explicitly advertising long lines as a reason to give them more money. As an MMO player, you are familiar with “pay us to skip the built-in hassles.” Of course, that same marketing encourages everyone to think of the park as having long lines, annoys the people paying the normal amount because of P2Win, and then they cannot even celebrate the express passes as being popular because skipping to the front just becomes another line if too many people are paying for the privilege.

: Zubon

There is a certain class of fan that treats a day at the park like a game. Most time on rides and least time in line wins. With the addition of FastPass, the strategy has become even more Serious Business.
— TV Tropes on Disney Theme Parks

In one of KTR’s great missed connections, I am at Disney right now. Here, as in your game’s forums, you can take advantage of the people who very seriously study your form of entertainment.

Most of our readers are not serious theorycrafters who believe others are borderline griefers if they are intentionally being less than maximally efficient. Those theorycrafters, however, are really useful to the rest of us because they find the efficiencies, and that knowledge can spread freely. You need not be maximally efficient to learn how you can do what you already do better with almost no effort.

Enter tourings plans. People have already figured out which days at the park are the busiest and what order to ride rides to minimize your time waiting in line. You do not need to take the maximally efficient route to knock an hour or more off your waiting time, which is a good thing both for you and for the people who would be standing behind you in those lines.

Bonus note 1: in the off-season, all lines are shorter, so I have stood in perhaps an hour of lines over two days. Bonus note 2: if you are relatively sedentary, as gamers often are, practice walking and being on your feet for hours. After two not-full days at the parks, we have one member of our party who wants a day off. That leads to bonus note 3: schedule a day off amidst a multi-park trip, preferably Saturday.

: Zubon

A friend in college had an unusual day in dance class: “run slowly,” his instructor said. He realized that, while he could run, he knew it as a single activity and had great trouble analyzing it to a series of individual steps and motions. He did it unthinkingly. Programmers and industrial/organizational psychologists will be familiar with the epiphany that writing an explicit process or algorithm is really rather difficult.

I think of this every time I see a routine where someone has clearly learned the individual motions and trained him/herself to perform them forward and backwards or in unexpected combinations. Contrarily reference celebrity judges on TV talent shows, some of whom are exceedingly talented performers with almost no ability to articulate why or how, as opposed to say Ben Folds and his self-consciously technical analysis on The Sing Off.

Which brings me to the question of when games train you to do something and then punish you for doing it. Do we like that? On the one hand, it creates interesting content with unusual mechanics like killing by healing or requiring you not to DPS too quickly. On the other hand, it seems perverse and just plain mean to reward something throughout the game then punish you for following that training. On the gripping hand, that seems like taking the “game as learning” experience to its highest level, where you not only know the techniques but know when not to use them and when and why to swap parts in and out.

I want to go with that as the final answer, but not everyone wants to get that deeply into their gaming, and it is still the case that you can almost always look up when you need to change tactics rather than learning something. That does not make the advanced learning a bad idea for the intended audience, but it may make it mostly pointless given the actual audience. If I could get a fourth hand, I might note that many games already design a lot of content for the top 5%, and the rest of the playerbase can participate in the intended spirit if it feels up to it.

: Zubon